Eight Portraits of a Lady
by Nagia
Summary: Eight reflections on love, loss, and where she hid the steel beneath her silk. Ensemble fic.
1. dust shall eat the days

**Eight Portraits of a Lady**

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i; dust shall eat the days

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He's been holding on really well for a few days, but it's clear to everyone that it broke him. It's even clear to him that it broke him. Barret hasn't left his house in days, and of course he brought Marlene. Nobody thought to tell Barret that it might be too hard on the kid, except Yuffie, and without her around to mediate, Barret isn't exactly listening to her. And Yuffie isn't exactly expressing herself clearly.

He should be sorting through her things right now. He should. There's not a whole hell of a lot to go through—most of it was destroyed with Midgar—but what remains clearly meant a lot to her. Everything has a new meaning. A meaning he knows. From the gloves she'd been wearing to the straw hat she wore when she and Marlene gardened. To the damned gardening shears.

He hasn't eaten since it happened. Elmyra brings him casseroles in covered dishes and puts them in his refrigerator, but he hasn't touched them and she knows it and she sounds stern when she tries to tell him to eat. He doesn't care. He doesn't eat. Every now and then, he takes a sip of water from the tap.

"I'm sorry," he tells the empty air. He made a token effort to look decent for the funeral. Ran a brush through his hair. Shaved. Put on clean clothes. The funeral wasn't as hard as he expected.

It wasn't until later that things got hard. After the funeral, when he went home alone to his empty house except for Yuffie (who came out of some misguided something, he thinks) and Barret and Marlene. They don't belong in the house, he thinks. Barret and Marlene belong next door. He wants to be left in peace. Or maybe in pieces.

It's all easier if he closes his eyes and thinks of Zack. Those memories are better, happier, brighter. He can be another person, someone who didn't love her, but eventually all roads lead back to someone else, flowers blooming in broken floorboards, laughter and cotton candy and smiles and swords in stomachs.

That's when he opens his eyes and sees his empty house. Sees the dust. Sees the things of hers he still hasn't packed into cardboard boxes. He understands why Sephiroth destroyed Nibelheim now, understands so completely that he'd do it all over again, to his own home, to himself, if only he could.

On the bad days, he breaks things. Once, he breaks a street. And Reeve looks very sad when he shows up, even sadder than he looked at the funeral. His face is almost heartbroken when he quietly loops first one soft cuff and then the other around his wrists. They don't say anything when Reeve wraps one arm around his shoulders and escorts him off the street, into a waiting van.

He understands why.


	2. nights become mornings

**Eight Portraits of a Lady**

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ii; nights become mornings

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"Are you the husband?"

It's an honest, practical question, but he doesn't know how to answer.

It _feels_ like he lost a wife. They weren't married. She never married either of them. She was his next-door neighbor and Marlene's mother figure. She was the woman with whom nights became mornings, with whom he shared everything. The woman he held when she cried, the woman who cooked for his daughter and laughed for him and joined his resistance and forced him to be better than he was.

The funeral director apparently thinks he hasn't been heard. He asks the question again. "Are you the husband?"

"She never married," he replies.

"You said for us to say she is survived by her daughter, Marlene Wallace, but—"

He shuts that question down as quick as he can but it still stings. "It's a strange kinda family," he replies. "AVALANCHE."

The funeral director shuts down quick after that. They have a nice little autopilot funeral. Marlene cries, and Yuffie tries hard not to, and Red of course is dry eyed literally but he suspects not nearly so dry eyed metaphorically.

Metaphorically. A word he'd never heard used in a sentence until he met her.

Autopilot funeral, except for that one niggling question, the one he remembers as the opening notes start to play.

"Is there any specific music that she would like played at the funeral? Do you have her favorite record, perhaps?"

"Somethin' on the piano," he remembers saying.

They obliged. It's a somber piano rendition of "Now, Sunrise_,_"the final number in _Loveless_. He watches Yuffie's face go white with fury, watches as Red's tail lashes, watches as Marlene's shoulders shake even harder. Their children ain't taking this well, he thinks to himself before the howling anger takes him over, too.

He wants to stand up and tell them that Tifa was no fan of _Loveless_. That dawnsong of the dead and dying ain't no thing to be playing at the funeral of a hero, he wants to say. This is a sick, cruel joke and the least you could be doing, he wants to tell them, is not fucking _ruining_ the funeral of a goddamn hero.

Even Vincent and Reeve look visibly angry. Cid's hands shake when he lights a cigarette.

And Cloud, of course, isn't taking it too well. He's alert, his head held high, his dry eyes narrowed. He reaches across his shoulder as if looking for the buster sword.

He takes Cloud home after the funeral. They need to sort her things, after all. Tough shit for you, he wants to tell Cloud. We all loved her a little. But of course tough love never works with Cloud. He needs a gentler touch.

And isn't that something, he wants to tell Yuffie and Cid so they can laugh bitterly with him, that the only person capable of helping him deal with her death—is her. She's the only person capable of helping any of them deal with it. And now she's dead.

When Cloud has retreated to the room he sleeps in and he has finished packing away as many things as neatly as he can in the cardboard boxes, he finds a place to sit and cradles his head in his hand.


	3. lay your weary head to rest

**Eight Portraits of a Lady**

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iii; lay your weary head to rest

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He wasn't there when she died, and that's the thing he regrets most. At the exact moment of her death, he was "busy" in Cosmo Canyon, laughing by the Cosmo Candle beneath a full moon. And somewhere else, half a world away, she was lying in a hospital bed with plastic tubes in her veins, smiling like the saint they're all going to turn her into.

Cloud smells of illness and dust. He has a strong suspicion that AVALANCHE's fearless leader hasn't eaten or even slept, really, in days. Or bathed. But he's clean-shaven and dry eyed, not making the wet sounds that Marlene is. So he doesn't mention it to anyone.

He even returns home, to his beautiful red canyon. He lives with and loves the land and the people who belong to it, just as he did before. He watches the Cosmo people light the Candle every night and laughs with them as they do so, but there is something tempering it. The knowledge that she will never laugh again, those reddish brown eyes never sparkling with laughter, that long lovely hair will never toss again.

A month later, he finds himself howling at the full moon, not with exultation, but with grief.

And two months later, on that full moon again, he howls once more. He howls for Cloud, who has been taken away "for help," and for Barret and Marlene, who are suffering, and for Yuffie and Reeve, who are trying to put the pieces back together. He's sure Vincent and Cid aren't having an easy time, either, but they're more independent.

He bears his own pain alone, howling for it last of all. He's going to miss her. It's selfish and he knows it. Maybe it was better for her to end this way, in a hospital, relatively free of pain.

At least she wasn't dead on arrival, he thinks. At least Cloud and Barret and Marlene got to say their goodbyes, even if it was all so fast, even if it was tragic and heartbreaking and not nearly enough.

It's still sudden, though.

He whimpers when he falls asleep at night.


	4. wet blurred skies

**Eight Portraits of a Lady**

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iv; blurred wet skies

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The sound of sirens hits her hard. It hits her hard every time she hears it. All she can think of is that porcelain pale skin, those fragile beautiful bonecrushing hands, long dark hair cut short.

Stitches. In the end, she thinks of stitches.

The funeral is hell. They play a song from _Loveless_ and she finds her hands clenching into painful fists. Hears her knuckles pop from the pressure. And Marlene cries and cries, so she pulls her close and strokes her hair. All the while, she thinks of the time this was done for her, as Aeris sank beneath the water and blood dripped redly on ancient marble, of those frail strong hands in their leather gloves sliding over her own short hair, of warm perfect arms wrapping around her, of her breath in the crook of her neck.

After the funeral, she follows Cloud home because she can tell that he's gone kupo nut on them all again. She figured he'd take it hard but this is kind of ridiculous, Barret says he's seen Cloud drinking straight from the tap and that is not normal people behavior. Is it a bizarre reaction to grief, or did that dumbass doctor kill Cloud's only link to sanity?

Murder, she thinks, is such an awful word. She wonders why that doctor isn't dead. Wonders why she hasn't killed him herself, why Cloud hasn't walked barefoot to the hospital and let go, drawn the Buster Sword and slipped into the Omnislash. Maybe he hasn't yet but he plans to. Why Barret hasn't found him and let loose with the gun arm, _rattattattat_. Why Vincent and Cid aren't helping.

AVALANCHE should protect its own, she thinks. She knows Red would agree with her, because she and Red think alike.

She helps Barret pack things. It's not easy. From the spare pairs of fighting gloves to the photographs that clearly aren't Cloud's. She has spare clothes, too. Yuffie pulls a denim skirt out of a chest of drawers, sees the patchwork lace trim, and laughs and cries and buries her face in one of the tee shirts she finds in the laundry. It smells a little of her and a little of sweat and a lot of alcohol, and she cries even harder.

She's seen bodies decomposing. She knows what that beautiful face will become, rotting beneath the ground. She wishes Cloud had done the less cruel thing and just fucking cremated her. Then she'd be ashes, not stiff waxy flesh and embalming fluid, destined to end up riddled with holes and maggots and patchwork rot until she's nothing but dirt. That's not the right fate for a woman like her. That's not the right fate for any of them.

She rests her head against Barret's chest, then, crying loudly and hard, sobbing and shaking as hard as her ribs and shoulders will let her. It's pretty damn hard, from the way Barret reacts at first, but then his arm settles around her and it's the strangest half-hug she's ever received. And in the background she can hear Marlene wail as she cries herself to sleep.

It's almost too hard. But in the back of her head she sees that gentle beautiful perfect smile, the one that made her want to cup that porcelain face in her hands. She hears that gentle, accented voice telling her that she can do this. That she's the only one of the three left, so she should show the steel underneath the silk and lift her chin and carry on, because that's what she and Aeris did.

Yes, she thinks even as she thinks of red-brown eyes and the Lifestream, alright, fine, I'll do it. I'll pick up where you left off. Where both of you left off. And she looks up at Barret and finds herself smiling.

"It'll be okay," she says. "We'll be okay."

Barret doesn't answer.


	5. steel into smoke

**Eight Portraits of a Lady**

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v; steel into smoke

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He lights a cigarette when he hears the news, rather than simply rolling it around in his fingers. He even smokes it, taking longer and longer drags. The nicotine doesn't help. Nothing helps.

Dead. She's dead. She and Aeris were the links that kept AVALANCHE together. Without their kindness, without their sympathy, the whole damn bunch of them would have killed each other long before Aeris ran off to the Forgotten City. God knows he and Yuffie never would have gotten along well enough for her to call him and tell him in the first place, and he remembers the rocky start he and Barret had.

He is intimately familiar with death, with near death. It seems strange that a woman who survived being bisected by Sephiroth, who survived falling into the Lifestream, who survived Meteor and everything else would die fragile and stitched up in a hospital bed.

Yuffie's voice breaks when she says, "She held on for Marlene. I really do think she was—" and here the barest hint of a sob, "waiting for her. So she could say goodbye."

And then she really does break down. "I don't think she wanted to leave, Cid."

"'Course she didn't," he tells her. "Didn't she lose her ma as a kid?"

Yuffie hangs up on him then. He reels, partly from the shock of the news, partly from the shock of Yuffie not being talkative even at an inopportune time. Her words echo around in his head, repeating themselves long after the dial tone has set in.

He sets the phone down and walks into their workroom. It's covered in gadgets and gears and engine parts and smells strongly of grease. Shera has her head bent over her worktable. She's humming something—her favorite song from _Loveless_, probably, though it's still hard for him to believe that she ever even liked that musical. He has to pick his way through the sharp metal objects littering the floor, but he eventually crosses the room and gathers her in his arms from behind.

He holds her tight, feeling her heartbeat underneath him, feeling her chest rise and fall in a startled breath.

"Cid?" Shera's voice is puzzled. "Is something wrong?"

"Ain't nothin'," he tells her, voice hoarse from the cigarette—or so he tells himself—and not because of the lump in his throat. He breathes in the scent that's on her hair, a mixture of engine grease and shea butter shampoo, and revels in the fact that she's there and breathing at all.

"Tell me," she says, turning just a little so she can see him, those mousy brown eyes sheathed in thick round mousy glasses. Those eyes know him too well. Maybe it's just that he's a bad husband—admittedly common-law—and she's right to be confused if he starts acting like a good one.

"Yuffie called. She didn't make it," he says. "Surgery didn't help. Barret damn near broke the doctor."

"How awful," Shera says.

Yeah, he thinks. How awful. Like it's a tragedy that has happened a thousand miles away to people they don't know and doesn't touch them at all. But it does touch them. She was a friend. They fell out of touch after they stopped the world from ending, and he regrets that. And now she's gone. Ripped straight out of the world, with only nine people and a robot to know or care that she's gone. The rest of the crazy lot she wound up saving won't do either, and that's a crying shame.

"We're going to the funeral," Shera says. "Cloud and Barret are going to need us."

Honestly, he doesn't really want to give a damn about Cloud and Barret and how they're going to need people. He wants to go for the woman they'll be burying. He wants to go because they should go, because they were friends. Hell, they should go because Shera wants to go, but with Shera, everything is always about other people. That's an argument he can save for later, when she's being unselfish about something else. He still wants to tell her that she should be selfish sometimes. He still knows her well enough to know that it's bothering her, too.

And she's right. Cloud and Barret are going to need them, that's true enough, and he has a feeling Yuffie's going to need help keeping Barret from breaking the doctor and Cloud from inflicting massive property damage on the fledgling city she died in.

"'course we are," he says, and kisses her very lightly on her temple, close to her hairline, because she likes those kisses, because they both need it.


	6. exigencies

**Eight Portraits of a Lady**

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vi; exigencies

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"Cloud is becoming a problem," he says to Yuffie.

Yuffie, who is holding on tightly to Cait Sith's plush body, only nods in response. She's looking down at something in her lap, though he isn't sure what that is. He thinks it might be her PHS.

"Aren't you worried about him?"

"Marlene just lost her mother. I'm more worried about that," Yuffie says. Her tone is listless. Not at all the exaggerated, hyper-emotional tones he's used to. He starts worrying about her, too.

"Barret wants to file a suit against the doctor," he says. "We need to get him to drop it. It won't solve anything and this city has too many other problems."

"He's doing what he needs to do," Yuffie says. "Can't say I blame him."

He resists the urge to slam his palm against the table. "Well, _I_ can. The last thing this city needs is people losing their faith in the only big hospital left on this side of the continent."

"And the last thing Barret needs is an incompetent doctor getting away with killing a member of AVALANCHE."

"Don't make my job harder," he says.

She just looks up at him, her expression twisted into something that makes his stomach tie itself in knots. He hasn't seen her look this angry in years. Since the Crisis. She stands up, dropping the Cait Sith body and fisting her hands on her hips.

"An eight year old girl lost her mother two months ago, and you're bitching to me about Barret making your job harder?" She steps just a little closer to him with each word.

"There is a broader picture here," he shoots back. "I have to think about the entire city. If you're going to help Wutai, you need to learn to do the same thing."

Her lip curls into something like disgust. "You really haven't learned anything from Shinra, have you. Better watch it, Reeve, or you might wind up terminating employees with extreme prejudice and killing the Planet."

He has to take a few deep breaths at that one. Any number of responses fly to the tip of his tongue, one about Wutai's lack of guilt in its own destruction, one about the right of a thief to criticize anyone's morality. He doesn't say any of them. She's hurting and, in a way, she's right. As an elected official, he has no right to interfere in the private sector. Barret has every right to sue. Cloud has every right to destroy his property. It is not until they actually have hurt the greater populace that he has any right to step in.

But it's still hard to sit and watch it happening. He changes the subject. "How are _you_ holding up?"

"I'm doing better than they are," she replies, which isn't really an answer at all but he will have to let it suffice. He appreciates that she isn't pretending to be fine. It makes him feel better about not being quite fine, either.

"And Marlene? How's she taking it?"

"She cries a lot," Yuffie says. "I'm not sure if that's good or bad."

"She probably needs to cry," he replies. He pauses, gathers his thoughts, tries to spin words into the shape he needs. "Thank you. For being there for them."

For being there for me, he doesn't say. Because it's hard to admit that he's grieving, too. He often feels like AVALANCHE wouldn't care, anyway. After all, he's not one of them. Not really. Cait might have been, but Reeve is an outsider and always will be.

Except for the women of the group. They accepted him. Aeris forgave him, Yuffie understood him, and Tifa mediated when Barret just couldn't drop the fact that he was a Shinra executive.

She cracks a smile. "I'm the one who can be. Nice to see somebody noticing, though."

He wants to ask her to do what he can't, what Barret and Cloud won't let him do. He wants to hold her, because she looks fragile. He wants to hold her so she'll hold him too.

He'll do none of those things, though. It's easier to hide behind his professional mask, to be the mayor. It's what she wants to see, anyway, so he'll give it to her.

"Cloud's still a problem," he says.


	7. lonely lullaby

**Eight Portraits of a Lady**

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vii; lonely lullaby

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Failed another woman, he thought when Yuffie called. It wasn't his first thought, but it was the one that kept circling in his head. He didn't even think to reprimand her for calling and hadn't in days. This makes three, he thought. Perhaps if he had been in town, if he hadn't let Yuffie's words and the things Barret very carefully did not say but clearly thought drive him away, perhaps—

Perhaps this might all have been prevented. It was not a thought he liked, remains a thought he dislikes and a thought he can't stop from circling around and around and around in his head. He begins to dread Yuffie's fragments of news. Barret's difficulties, Cloud's fractured and decaying mental state, Reeve's distance, Cid's silence, Red's sudden attempts to reconnect. And the most disturbing pieces of news revolve around Marlene. Her sudden lack of interest in school, the longer and longer naps once she arrives home, the scratches and bruises on her fingers and knuckles.

It's all worrisome. It's all painful, made more so by the fact that he doesn't know how to ease their suffering. He should know. He wishes he knew. All he can do is stand by and watch, and if he's going to do that, he'd rather do it from a distance.

Today, two months after the funeral, Yuffie calls again. He lets the PHS ring several times before he opens the channel.

"News time for Vincent Valentine," she says, her tone cheerful with just an edge of bitterness. For all her weekly calls, she has never given him a clear picture of how _she_ is doing, and he has his suspicions that it isn't well.

"Let's hear it," he says. "Cloud and Barret?"

"Freaking out as expected. I keep expecting Barret to pound his chest and empty a few rounds into the ceiling. Or the floor. Or Cloud."

Typical Yuffie humor, but he hears something broken in her tone. She isn't as happy as she's pretending to be. He wants to tell her to stop pretending. It doesn't do either of them any good, he wants to say.

"Marlene?"

Here, Yuffie's voice breaks. "Misses her. Looks like I'm going to have to learn how to braid hair."

It's a strange comment, but Yuffie makes strange comments all the time. He attempts to interpret it, fails, and ultimately dismisses it. "The others?"

"Cid still hasn't said anything, but Shera says he's been working on a second _Highwind_, so we shouldn't be too worried. Red still calls me once a week, if he can get somebody to work his PHS for him."

But she doesn't say anything about Reeve or herself. He is still not used to people—though he's better with AVALANCHE—but he is far from stupid. She's hiding something.

"And you?"

"Me?" Yuffie sounds startled.

"You," he says, watching as wild chocobos scratch through the grasslands.

"I'm, uh, I'm getting things done," she says.

It is an answer that unsettles him. It is not an answer to the question he asked, not remotely. He considers rephrasing the question, decides not to. Her answer would only be more disheartening than _I'm getting things done_.

He goes quiet for a long time. "And Reeve?" He asks at last.

"He thinks Cloud 'is becoming a problem,'" she says. The electric, scorching fury he remembers from the Crisis is back in her voice, though he only hears a touch of it. There's derision and scorn in the way she emphasizes the word _problem_. "He thinks he's not one of us, so he just sits at his desk and talks about the big picture."

If anything, her tone becomes even more scathing when she says _the big picture_, as if the words are about to bite her tongue or are somehow dirty.

"You are attempting to convince him otherwise?"

"I've been trying, but he's not listening to me." She pauses. "Come back."

There is an unspoken plea in that request. Come back. Talk some sense into him. Talk some sense into them all. Do the things I cannot, that AVALANCHE won't allow me to do, because of my age and gender.

He has no hopes for his ability to help Cloud or Barret. He understands their suffering, understands that it must be faced and defeated by oneself. Time is the only aid, time and understanding. Grief is a god who must be self-slain.

But he can at least ease Yuffie's way.

"I can be there in three days," he says.

"I'll get a room ready." There's just a hint of hope in her voice, but it's a hint he likes.


	8. mother

**Eight Portraits of a Lady  
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**viii; mother**  
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She can feel the flowers' cool stems within the circle of her fist. She doesn't want to let go of them. Not because they're pretty, but because if she brings flowers to the grave then it will all be real. It was hard enough watching them lower her into the ground, hard enough just to cry and not demand that they stop.

"I'm sorry I haven't visited," she says, knows what the response would be.

She's with the Lifestream now. It's not like visiting here, the gravesite, is really visiting her.

"I still love you," she says, hoping she hears.


End file.
